New England Journal of Public PolicyVolume 26Issue 1 Special Issue on Education Article 12

9-22-2014

Getting to the Core and Evolving the EducationReform Movement to a System of ContinuousImprovementFernando M. ReimersHarvard Graduate School of Education

Eleonora Villegas-ReimersWheelock College

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Recommended CitationReimers, Fernando M. and Villegas-Reimers, Eleonora (2014) "Getting to the Core and Evolving the Education Reform Movement toa System of Continuous Improvement," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 26: Iss. 1, Article 12.Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol26/iss1/12

New England Journal of Public Policy

1

Getting to the Core and Evolving the Education Reform Movement

to a System of Continuous Improvement

Fernando M. Reimers

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Eleonora Villegas-Reimers

Wheelock College

This article places the most recent study of PISA (Programme for International Student

Assessment) in historical perspective, reviewing the role of international comparisons in efforts

to build public education systems as key institutions of democratic societies. It discusses the

findings for the United States, examining differences with other participating countries. It also

looks at a paradox. Despite the high priority education has received in the United States in the

past two decades, the country underperformed in a number of indicators in the PISA in

comparison with many other countries participating in the study. The authors explain the

findings as the result of an underlying paradigm to education reform that has given priority to

efficiency improvements rather than to educational innovation to increase the relevancy of

education in helping students gain the skills necessary in the twenty-first century. The authors

argue that these findings underscore the need to give more attention to teacher preparation and

to add the voice of the profession to the design and execution of education reform efforts.

______________________________________________________________________________

The idea that all persons should be educated is a product of the Enlightenment, the philosophical

movement that espoused that ordinary people can rule themselves, assisted by reason and

science and by the capacity to associate with others to improve themselves and their

communities, and in so doing reduce human suffering. Public education, like modern democratic

government, is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment concept of self-rule, and, like democratic

government, it aspires to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own lives and

communities.

The ongoing construction of democratic societies and the public education systems that

equip all citizens for self-rule are global movements that have benefited from the sharing of ideas

and observations across national borders and across the centuries. Marc Antoine Jullien, a

journalist who lived during the French Revolution, was the first person on record to propose

giving systematic attention to the comparative study of educational practices and experiences as

a way to help emerging democratic nations in Europe decide how to build public education

systems.

Fernando M. Reimers is the Ford Foundation Professor of Practice in International Education at the

Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he focuses his comparative research and teaching on the

policy and programmatic efforts that support twenty-first- century skills.

Eleonora Villegas-Reimers is an associate professor of education at Wheelock College, where she

teaches courses in education, curriculum development, and human development. Her research focuses on

teacher professional development.

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Jullien, who admired and studied the Swiss educator Henry Pestalozzi’s model of schooling

based on the concept that learners should be taught according to their stage of development,

created a publication to engage various educators in a discussion of alternative ideas about how

to educate children. He proposed that such exchange of ideas about global education approaches

could support efforts to improve education around the world. He proposed also, but never

implemented, what should have been the first comparative survey of education, a systematic

effort to study how various districts and authorities were organizing schools, who attended, how

they were grouped, who taught them, and what they were taught.

The Founding Fathers in North and South America borrowed and exchanged ideas about

how to make the institutions of democracy work and how to create educational institutions that

prepare citizens for self-rule. Francisco de Miranda, one of the leaders of the independence

movement in South America, spent two years traveling in the United States and studying the

institutions of the new nation. In 1784 he visited the college presidents Ezra Stiles of Yale and

James Lloyd of Harvard to discuss the role of educational institutions in promoting an

enlightened order.

In 1810 Simón Bolivar, a leader of the South American independence movement, visited

Joseph Lancaster in London. Lancaster had devised a low-cost system, the monitorial system, for

educating the children of the poor. In 1808 Lancaster and his followers had created a society to

promote this educational approach, which inspired the first efforts to systematically prepare

people for the teaching profession. Lancaster himself traveled widely in the Americas. At

Bolivar’s invitation, he lived in Venezuela between 1825 and 1827 and established the first

teacher education school in that country. Also, several decades before Horace Mann launched his

campaign for public education in Massachusetts, Lancaster gave a series of lectures in the

eastern United States, explaining how this system could help expand access to education.

In 1804 John Quincy Adams, the sixth U.S. president, published his Letters on Silesia

about the public schools in the region that is now part of Germany, Poland, and the Czech

Republic. And in 1843, as secretary of education, Horace Mann visited Prussia to inform his

thinking about how to strengthen public schools. He saw public schools as the wheel of the

social machinery that would equip children of an already diverse country to develop the skills

and the trust in one another needed to make democracy work.

Horace Mann’s wife, Mary Tyler Peabody, also played an important role in facilitating

the transfer of ideas about education across borders. She maintained an extensive correspondence

with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Argentinean educator and later president whose ideas

provided the foundation of public education in South America. Sarmiento met Peabody in 1847

when he came to Massachusetts to discuss with Mann the recently published Common School.

The first center of comparative education in the United States, Teachers College at

Columbia University, was established in 1893 in the hope that the study of comparative

experience would benefit the teachers in training as they sought approaches that would be

effective in inner city schools. The progressive educator John Dewey, who joined the faculty in

the early twentieth century, drew many insights about the role of schools in a democratic society

from his travels and systematic study of education in various nations.

In the 1960s the first systematic comparative study of educational systems was developed

under the leadership of Torsten Husén, a prominent Swedish educator who helped create the

field of comparative education. Drawing on the lessons of his comparative studies to support the

reform of Swedish education, Husén helped create comprehensive and detracked schools. His

six-country study led to the establishment of the International Association for the Evaluation of

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Educational Achievement, an independent international cooperative that has produced

comparative studies in language, mathematics, science, and civics.

In 2000 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) initiated

what would become a periodic cross-national survey of student knowledge and skills and of

students’, teachers’, and principals’ reports of school practices, processes, and characteristics that

had a bearing on instruction. In 2012 this study, known as the Programme for International

Student Assessment (PISA), was administered in sixty-five countries, twenty-nine of them

members of the OECD. The PISA study is based on knowledge and skills assessments and

questionnaires administered to samples of fifteen-year-olds and their teachers and school

principals. These questionnaires explore self-efficacy, effort, and persistence and how student

knowledge is related to various student characteristics, including gender, immigrant status, and

socioeconomic status. Students are chosen to be representative of the fifteen-year-old population

of students in school in each participating country and, in some instances, in particular states or

other subnational jurisdictions. The 2012 study focused on mathematics, and most of the follow-

up analysis was based on data about math instruction, though students were also tested in the

areas of literacy and science. The 2012 PISA reports include analyses of changes of student

performance, comparing test data from 2012 with data collected in previous years, and

comparing student achievement data from previous years with assessment data from samples of

adults (ages sixteen to sixty-five) in literacy, mathematics, and problem solving collected in

2011–12.

Key Findings of the 2012 PISA Study

The OECD published six reports that analyze the findings of the PISA.1 One report focuses on

the implications of PISA for the United States. The following are among the key findings of the

reports of particular relevance to the United States.

What is learned in school has lasting consequences for economic and civic participation

and for personal health. The survey of adult skills demonstrates strong correlations

between the literacy and numeracy assessment results of particular age groups in 2012

and the PISA results for the same age group in an earlier assessment. Also, adults with

high levels of literacy are significantly more likely to be employed and have high wages,

to report high levels of political efficacy, to participate in volunteer activities, to have

high levels of trust, and to report good health.2 The United States, however, despite high

levels of educational attainment, has greater proportions of adults with poor literacy and

numeracy skills.

Student knowledge and skills in mathematics, literacy, and science vary widely within

countries and between countries. Forty countries showed improvement in average student

performance over a decade in at least one of the three assessments. One of the strongest

predictors of that performance is the socioeconomic background of students, though this

relationship also varies across countries.

The performance of U.S. students compared with that of all other students was average in

the three domains assessed. Twenty-five percent of the students in the United States do

not reach the most basic levels of math proficiency, and only 9 percent reach the highest

levels. The levels of inequality in student knowledge and skills for students of different

socioeconomic backgrounds in the United States are greater than the average for all

participating countries. Though some of the countries participating in the assessment

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showed improvement in PISA scores, the United States showed no improvements in a

decade.

Beliefs about self-efficacy, effort, and persistence are interrelated and vary across schools

and countries. Four of five students in the OECD report that they are happy in school and

that they feel they belong in school. Tardiness, however, is common, with one in three

students reporting that he or she arrived late to school. One in four reported that he or she

skipped classes. These findings are negatively related to student performance.

Student achievement is related to the ability to handle a lot of information, to understand

things quickly, and to link facts together easily. It is also related to whether students seek

explanations and like to solve complex problems.

The highest performing education systems allocate resources equitably across schools,

give teachers and principals autonomy over curriculum and assessment, and engage all

stakeholders in education, including students, by providing them avenues to offer

feedback on teacher practices.

Compared with all other students, immigrant and low-income students perform at lower

levels, on average, on the assessments, and this relationship is strong. The impact of this

relationship, however, varies among countries, and, for some countries, the impact has

diminished in the past decade. In all countries, a certain percentage of students in the

bottom quartile of the income distribution perform at the highest levels on the

assessments, though this percentage varies across countries. In the United States the

relationship between student achievement and socioeconomic background is similar to

the average relationship in the OECD. Also, in the United States, the percentage of

immigrant students is larger and grew more than for other OECD countries on average.

For the OECD, immigrant students increased from 9 percent in 2003 to 12 percent in

2012, whereas for the United States, the corresponding figures were 15 percent and 22

percent. But, for the OECD, the achievement gap associated with immigrant students

diminished during that same period. Canada, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, and the United

Kingdom show no achievement gap associated with immigrant status. Immigrant students

tend to be segregated in disadvantaged schools. In the United States, immigrants make up

40 percent of the students in disadvantaged schools, compared with 13 percent in

advantaged schools.

Many countries, including the United States, have gender gaps in knowledge and skills,

as well as in students’ attitudes toward mathematics, with girls reporting less

perseverance, less motivation to learn mathematics, less self-efficacy, and more anxiety.

By age fifteen students who participate in preschool have higher levels of achievement in

mathematics, representing more than a year of schooling on average. Once

socioeconomic status is accounted for, this advantage disappears for the United States

and a few other countries.

On average, OECD countries allocate the same number of mathematics teachers to

socioeconomically disadvantaged schools as to advantaged schools, though school

principals in disadvantaged schools report greater difficulty attracting qualified teachers.

No differences were observed in the United States between disadvantaged and

advantaged schools in the levels of education and in student-teacher ratios.

Several countries, such as Estonia, Poland, Brazil, Colombia, Japan, and Mexico, have

implemented reforms aimed at strengthening the teaching profession by increasing the

requirements to obtain a teaching license, providing incentives for high-quality applicants

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to enter the teaching profession, and aligning the incentives for career advancement with

professional development. Other countries, such as Japan and Portugal, have reformed

curriculum to align it with students’ interests and twenty-first-century skills. Israel,

Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, and others have targeted policies and resources to

improve low-performing schools. Colombia, Poland, Korea, and others have given

schools and local authorities more autonomy and instituted policies to encourage

collaboration and accountability.

Noting the relationship between socioeconomic disadvantages and educational

achievement, the volume 2 report, Excellence through Equity, suggests new approaches to

improve educational opportunity. It recommends, for example, that countries with large

concentrations of low-performing students in particular schools target interventions to those

schools and that countries in which low-performing students are more equally distributed across

schools target interventions to specific students. The United States is one such country.

According to the report, personalized interventions might involve a specialized curriculum,

additional instructional resources or economic assistance, or professional development for

teachers that emphasizes best practice for students in low socioeconomic levels. For countries

with relatively weak relationships between socioeconomic background and performance, the

report recommends applying policies to improve education for all students.

The Paradox of Underachievement despite Equality of Educational

Opportunity in the United States

The United States spends more money on education than most other countries and its citizenry

and government have made education an important priority, yet, compared with students in the

other countries participating in the PISA assessment, U.S. students obtain results that are

mediocre in terms of average performance of students and in terms of the extent to which the

student achievement gap relates to socioeconomic background. U.S. students underperform with

respect to the size of the U.S. economy, spending per student, parental education levels, and the

share of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. With respect to the percentage of immigrant

students, U.S. performance levels are average.3

How can we explain the paradox that even though education is a priority in the United

States we obtain poor results? Are we not doing enough? Are we doing the wrong things? Should

we focus more of our efforts outside of schools? Are we emphasizing knowledge and skills not

measured in the PISA studies?

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the United States has made efforts to

reform education that have focused on assessing student performance, defining and raising

educational standards, and introducing accountability measures based on those standards. The

most recent effort was the establishment of consistent national standards, known as the Common

Core. The goal of these new standards is to elevate expectations for learning for all students,

level those expectations, allow a seamless transfer of students across schools within and between

states, identify good practices across states, and develop innovations to support instructional

improvement in ways that benefit from the scale that a national framework of standards would

provide. Though the recent PISA study was conducted before the Common Core standards were

implemented, the report for the United States compares the items of the PISA mathematics

assessment with those in the Common Core and concludes that, if well implemented, the

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Common Core might help improve the overall performance of U.S. students relative to their

peers in other OECD nations.

The report for the United States includes a chart titled “School principals’ views of how

teacher behavior affects learning.”4 The principals reported that the following had relatively little

influence in their schools: lack of encouragement of students by their teachers to achieve their

full potential (89 percent), poor teacher-student relations (94 percent), teachers having to teach

students of heterogeneous ability levels in the same class (68 percent), teachers having to teach

students of diverse ethnic backgrounds in the same class (76 percent), teachers having low

expectations of their students (83 percent), teachers not meeting individual students’ needs (76

percent), teacher absenteeism (91 percent), staff resistance to change (72 percent), teachers being

too strict (95 percent), teachers being late for classes (99 percent), and teachers not being well

prepared for class (93 percent). In all these indicators, the situation reported by U.S. principals is

better than the situation reported by principals for the OECD on average. Furthermore, these

indicators suggest a strong sense of professionalism among U.S. teachers. Most teachers have

good relations with their students. They are not absent, not too strict, and not late for classes, and

they prepare for classes. Areas for improvement include, most notably, developing skills to teach

heterogeneous classrooms, helping to meet individual students’ needs, being open to change,

developing higher expectations of students, and encouraging students to achieve to their full

potential.

These efforts and achievements suggest that where the United States underperforms

relative to other countries, it is not for lack of trying. But it is possible that the U.S. strategies of

educational improvement have not emphasized teacher development as much as elements such as

standard setting, assessment, and accountability. We return to this point in the next section.

It may be that there is a limit to how much schools can compensate for social

disadvantage, though the PISA reports find no national-level relationship between income

inequality and the extent to which socioeconomic background of students relates to student

performance. Similarly, there are no differences in the performance of students in schools in

large urban areas and those in small rural areas. This finding suggests that underachievement is

not exclusive to students in poor neighborhoods. Thus, it is not the overall level of income

disparities in the country that explains the underperformance of poor children but rather the

influence of factors associated to living in poverty. Poor children, for example, may suffer the

consequences of hunger or of poor nutrition or of living in environments where adult caregivers

have limited time and skills to support their education, or where they are exposed to violence and

other risks. They may also suffer disadvantages that could be mediated by schools, such as being

enrolled in schools that have few resources or in schools where they experience classroom

discipline challenges or where their teachers have low expectations for them or are not able to

teach them effectively.

Unraveling the U.S. Paradox and Refocusing on the Teaching Profession to

Link Policy to Practice

Reform efforts in the United States have emphasized policy shifts and governance and leadership

by those with formal authority for educational administration, rather than the expertise or agency

of teachers and students. Ideas imported from business management, such as “what gets

measured gets managed,” have dominated over ideas generated in the education field about how

students learn and about the proximal influences in learning of students or teachers. These

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traditional ideas imported from business management, which view educational systems as

hierarchies rather than as professional networks, have led to reforms aimed at improving

efficiency rather than fostering innovation.5 If Marc Antoine Jullien were alive today, leading his

comparative education network, he would describe U.S. education reformers as obsessed with

defining standards and measuring everything, enamored with their own leadership, disdainful of

their teachers, somewhat aloof with students and learning, and inattentive to the purposes of

education and to how those shape relevance and quality.

In taking a top-down, hierarchical, view of educational change, the reform movement has

largely ignored the potential of bottom-up improvement and innovation networks. Abundant

efforts and monies have been spent on developing and administering tests to students, and now to

teachers, and in developing methodologies to model the contributions of teachers to learning.

Considerably less attention has been given to discerning what role teachers can and should play

in shaping efforts to improve education and how best to support them in their role. In an age

when technology, relying on collective intelligence, increasingly enables networks to collaborate

in the solution of complex problems,6 the dependence of the U.S. education reform movement on

early twentieth-century management approaches in the hope of supporting twenty-first-century

education is anachronistic. It undermines the profession and constrain the innovation needed to

teach students the skills they will need in the twenty-first century and to respond to other

adaptive challenges.

Compounding the challenges that result from using dated ideas about the management of

hierarchical organizations to support adaptive innovation, reformers have too often depended on

a narrative that announces that our education system is in crisis. Some reformers have suggested

that teachers are lazy and out to help themselves rather than the students and that the country’s

economic future is at stake if we do not find a way to catch up with the rest of the world,

especially with the countries whose students are scoring higher than our students in assessments

such as PISA and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study). This

approach may serve politicians seeking to “create space” for reform, or it may appeal to the

extremists who, despite the fact that they represent a small percentage of the population, have

captured much of our political space.7 Those extremists, at both ends of the political spectrum,

have most recently made common cause in opposing the Common Core, though they could not

possibly agree on an alternative approach to improving opportunities for children to be educated.

This approach may also serve other interest groups who wish to access a portion of taxpayer or

philanthropic funds for the latest innovation, technology, assessment system, or theory. But the

narrative of crisis is more likely to undermine the teaching profession than to build it and

unlikely to support the risk taking and creativity that are necessary to innovate for adaptive

improvement.

The experience of countries that have shown the most sustained levels of educational

improvement, such as Singapore, South Korea, Poland, and Germany, suggest that educational

change should focus on developing a growth mindset that emphasizes possibility and values

what students and teachers do and what they have to say about how to continuously improve

their schools. This approach requires taking the conversation to the local level, where much of

the control of our schools has traditionally been. We need to create a sound education system

that allows each person to learn from his or her own experience and from the experience of

others and, as a result, to continuously improve. Technological platforms, such as Quora, allow

for the use of such forms of collective intelligence in improving schools in unprecedented ways.

In such a networked system teachers and students are central, for their practice, shaped by their

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aspirations, motivation, skills, and learning, matters most to how students learn and develop. In

that system, teachers, who are selected rigorously and educated to lead the education system as

they engage in cycles of continuous experimentation, learning, and improvement.

Perhaps it is also time that we begin to tone down our rhetoric about the importance of

“leadership” and replace it with a narrative about professionalism and expertise that recognizes

that the interactions between students and teachers are core to helping all students develop the

full range of competencies they will need in the twenty-first century. We must begin to build and

depend more on networks that effectively mobilize all the knowledge of key stakeholders in

education. To the extent that we should care about how our education system compares with the

education systems in other countries, maybe we should care less about developing test after test

for every single skill and piece of knowledge mastered by the students and the teachers and focus

on the professional development of teachers and in building systems of collective intelligence

that can support innovation and disruption. The goal should be achieving meaningful educational

purposes rather than simply making gains in efficiency to achieve the goals of the past.

Fortunately we will not have to start from scratch to build this new approach, but we will

need to change the negative views and low levels of trust that as a society we seem to have about

our teachers. It will be necessary also to find out what is working well and why and to celebrate

it and share it widely. There are plenty of good practices and results to celebrate, newspapers

headlines of PISA results notwithstanding. For example, in keeping with the OECD average, 80

percent of the students in U.S. schools report being happy in school and most students report

having good relationships with their teachers. Another cause for celebration is that, as reported

by their students, our teachers are more likely to deploy a wider range of effective teacher

practices than their counterparts in the OECD.

Numerous reported findings point to the critical importance of teacher practice and

preparation, while the findings about the importance of governance reforms are less conclusive.

For example, the strong relationship between principals reporting low morale among teachers

and teachers’ practice having a negative impact on student learning suggests that teachers are

more effective when their morale is high. Morale is related to several factors, including school

climate, which in the United States is particularly poor in disadvantaged schools. When teachers

are not prepared to address classroom management and to plan effectively how to deal with it, or

how to be effective with children who come unprepared to engage in the teaching and learning

process, they do not fare well and, as a result, their morale declines. Large numbers of once

highly motivated and optimistic teachers leave the profession within the first five years when

they report feeling disempowered and ineffective in their teaching. That high level of attrition in

the teaching profession in the United States needs to be studied systematically.

We also need studies to help us understand the causes of our teacher shortages. Though

there are no differences between advantaged and disadvantaged schools in the number of

teachers per student or in teachers’ educational qualifications, U.S. principals who report that

teacher shortages hinder learning are in schools where students have lower levels of

achievement. Principals of disadvantaged schools in the United States are more likely than

principals in advantaged schools to report teacher shortages. This fact suggests that having a

university degree is a poor proxy for teacher quality, and that there are large variations in quality,

as perceived by principals, even among teachers who have university degrees. These variations

in quality result from the large heterogeneity of U.S. universities and teacher education programs

in particular and from the fact that the education reform movement has largely ignored teacher

preparation.

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The conditions in which teachers work vary also in ways that make disadvantaged

schools less attractive and effective. School principals in advantaged schools are more likely to

report that material resources are adequate than their counterparts in disadvantaged schools.

The assessment of the performance of U.S. students in the PISA mathematics test,

compared with the performance of their peers in high-performing countries, reveals that U.S.

students underperform in geometrical reasoning and in the ability to mathematically model real

world problems, to interpret real world aspects, and to use the number pi. These knowledge and

skill gaps in higher-order activities suggest that changes in the pedagogy and in the curriculum

may help students gain competency. It is well known, for example, that effective math teachers

have mastered the math content and the pedagogical skills to teach it and also that they can

develop curriculum and implement it effectively. Yet, many teacher preparation programs

emphasize the math content knowledge, the kind of knowledge measured in teacher tests across

the nation, leaving it up to individual teachers to figure out how to be effective in teaching

higher-order mathematical thinking and skills. It is unlikely that we will be able to help students

gain these skills with the same pedagogies we have used in the past. Differences in the kind of

activities students engage in in the United States and those students engage in in other countries

support the idea that a richer pedagogical repertoire might contribute to student achievement. For

example, less than 20 percent of the boys and about 5 percent of the girls in the United States

program computers, below the average in the other OECD countries. There is a similar gap

between the percentage of boys who play chess (20 percent) and girls who do (5 percent). There

are also differences, though smaller, between more and less advantaged students in their

participation of these activities.

Students’ reports that suggest that a greater percentage of U.S. teachers deploy effective

practices than the OECD average suggest also that those teachers who do not use effective

practices, a significant percentage of teachers in the United States, could use professional

development. For example, when asked about their teachers’ use of cognitive-activation

strategies, only 69 percent of the U.S. students reported that their teachers asked them questions

to make them reflect on the problems they were studying, 70 percent reported that their teachers

gave them problems that required them to think for an extended period, 47 percent said their

teachers asked them to decide on their own procedures for solving complex problems, 55 percent

said their teachers presented problems for which there is no immediate obvious method of

solution, 68 percent reported that teachers presented problems in different contexts to help them

know they had understood the concepts, 73 percent said teachers helped them learn from the

mistakes they had made, 77 percent reported teachers asked them to report how they had solved

a problem, 76 percent said teachers presented problems that required them to apply what they

had learned to new contexts, and 69 percent said teachers gave them problems that can be solved

in different ways.8

Teachers in the United States are also more likely to use teacher-directed instruction than

the OECD average. Seventy-four percent of the students report that teachers set clear goals for

learning, 65 percent report that teachers ask students to present their reasoning at some length, 80

percent report that teachers ask questions to check for understanding, 49 percent report that

teachers start lessons with a short summary of the previous lesson, and 83 percent report that

teachers tell students what they have to learn (fig. III.5.7).

Teachers in the United States are less student oriented than teacher directed. Nineteen

percent of the students in the United States, compared with 30 percent in the OECD, report that

teachers differentiate the work they give to struggling students and the work they give to fast

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learners. Thirty percent of U.S. students report that teachers assign projects that require at least a

week to complete; the OECD average is 17 percent. Fifty percent of U.S. students report that

teachers have them work in small groups; the OECD average is 23 percent. And 17 percent of

U.S. students report that teachers ask them to help plan a class; the OECD average is the same

(fig. III.5.8).

Teachers in the United States are also more likely than those in the other OECD countries

to use formative assessments, though many could improve in this domain. Forty-six percent of

U.S. students report that teachers provide them feedback on their performance, 33 percent report

that teachers point out their strengths and weaknesses, 74 percent report that teachers tell them

what is expected in an assignment or test, and 51 percent report that teachers tell them what they

need to do to become better in mathematics (fig III.5.9).

The report for the United States also reveals that basic issues of class management need

attention. Though on average U.S. principals report a disciplinary climate that compares well

with that in other countries, students reporting the worst disciplinary climates are almost twice as

likely to be among the lowest performers. One issue is absenteeism, which includes skipping

classes or whole days of school. Student absenteeism in the United States, reported by 28 percent

of students, is negatively associated with student achievement and more likely to occur among

lower-income students. On a scale that measures socioeconomic advantage, 25 percent of the

students from the top quarter skip classes, whereas 40 percent from the bottom quarter do. A

third of the students who skip classes are in schools where more than half of the students skip

classes. In the past decade, disadvantaged students have become more likely to skip classes.

Teachers need also to develop skills that help students develop drive, self-efficacy, and a

sense of belonging in schools. The report shows a significantly higher sense of belonging among

students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds than from their poorer peers, even when their

actual performance in mathematics is identical. This difference is greater in the United States

than the average for the OECD. Also, compared with the average for the OECD (70 percent),

fewer students in the United States (60 percent) are in schools where there is a consensus on the

importance of the social and emotional development of students. This figure is lower than that

for the United States in only eight countries. Another measure that is related to student

achievement, openness to problem solving, is higher in the United States for boys than for girls

and higher for more socioeconomically advantaged students than for their poorer peers, even

when their actual mathematics performance is the same. Mathematical self-efficacy, another

construct related to mathematics performance, is higher for boys than for girls, even when their

actual performance is identical.

Another finding of the report is that governance matters only to the extent that it gives

teachers voice in school decision-making. Whether students attend public or private schools, for

example, makes no difference, after accounting for the socioeconomic intake of the school. What

does matter, however, is school autonomy, the posting of achievement data, and teacher

accountability and discretion over decisions. These factors are all associated with higher levels of

student achievement. There is also an interaction between school autonomy and teacher

collaboration with management. In schools with poor teacher collaboration with management,

more autonomous schools have lower levels of student achievement than less autonomous

schools, whereas the reverse is true in schools with better teacher collaboration with

management.

Finally, the report highlights the need for U.S. teachers to be able to personalize

instruction. Because of the heterogeneity of U.S. classrooms, the most effective approaches to

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closing equity gaps among those discussed in the assessment would be those that attend to

individual differences. Developing the skills to do so requires a high level of professional

expertise and perhaps more effective use of technology to personalize instruction.

These findings suggest that teacher preparation should be significantly more central in the

education reform movement than it has been to date, and that teachers need to play a central role

in designing and implementing that reform, in contributing what they know about practices that

can help students learn, and in building effective platforms for collective intelligence of the

profession on these issues. Continuing to view teachers as objects of education reform when they

should be professional partners in the design and execution of education reform reflects a

managerial approach that was designed to improve the efficiency of factories in the early

twentieth century, not the approach we need to sustain innovation in addressing the adaptive

challenges faced by our schools.

Lessons from PISA

Many states have recently begun to implement the new Common Core standards. We need to

wait to measure their effectiveness in teaching the kind of knowledge and skills measured in the

PISA studies. A content analysis of those standards, however, suggests that they are likely to

provide access to higher-level mathematical knowledge. Also, the experience in Massachusetts,

where student performance in the PISA study is significantly better than it is for U.S. students on

average, suggests that the Common Core standards may lead to higher math achievement. In

Massachusetts, the state standards have been aligned with the Common Core for the past three

years, and the previous state standards were more in line with the Common Core than those in

other states. But though the Common Core standards are a promising avenue to improve

educational opportunity in this country, to fulfill that promise, they must be accompanied by

adequate teacher preparation and support and by an approach that resembles the innovation

networks of the twenty-first century, rather than the hierarchical bureaucracies of the past.

The PISA study, like most international comparative studies, focuses on specific content

knowledge and skills. We should therefore continue to use this content to evaluate the

effectiveness of our education system in that particular set of knowledge and skills. But that is

not enough. PISA does not measure other important content knowledge and skills, such as

creativity, innovative skills, socioemotional skills, and cognitive organizational skills, all of

which are also essential to the functioning and growth of individuals and societies.

Consequently, our educational efforts should be aligned not to what PISA measures but to goals

of education that prepare students to live, work, and participate civically in the twenty-first

century. Efforts are ongoing in the United States, and in other nations, to engage schools in the

development of a new, more ambitious range of competencies. These efforts are aligned with the

Partnership for Twenty-First-Century Skills (P21), a policy advocacy coalition that is active in

nineteen states. The P21 initiative, which highlights the importance of information and

communication skills, critical thinking and problem solving, and interpersonal and self-direction

skills, developed a framework identifying eighteen key skills, grouped in six areas that should be

included in the curriculum: core subjects, life skills, learning and thinking skills, twenty-first-

century content, twenty-first- century assessment, and information and communications

technology.

P21 emphasizes global awareness; civic literacy; health and wellness awareness; and

financial, economic, and business literacy. Many of these important domains are not measured

by PISA, nor are they measured by the existing assessment systems in place in the United States.

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In Massachusetts, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has, over the past six years,

appointed two task forces charged with defining a strategy to foster twenty-first-century skills in

the state’s schools. In 2008, the task force published a report that, in line with the P21 framework

and definitions, identifies five levers for change: educator training and development; standards;

assessment; accountability; and demonstration sites. With regard to educator training, the report

recommends “overhauling the state’s teacher training and professional development programs to

recruit and retain high achieving educators who have a background in and up-to-date knowledge

of twenty-first-century skills.” For the other levers, the report proposes embedding twenty-first-

century skills and content in every subject throughout the commonwealth curriculum, revising

the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, and establishing accountability

mechanisms for students, teachers, and leaders that focus on twenty-first-century skill

development. The demonstration sites would be up to five districts that would transform

themselves into twenty-first-century districts and up to ten schools that would transform

themselves into twenty-first-century schools. The report also recommends expanding learning

time in a hundred or more schools, and expanding teaching partners initiative, which would bring

to schools professionals and artists in a range of fields. The report also outlines a process to

manage the implementation of this plan that includes creating an advisory council charged with

building support, including the various professional education associations of teachers,

superintendents, and school committees in this process and collaborating with other states in

New England.9

A more recent report, published in 2012, From Cradle to Career: Educating Our

Students for Lifelong Success, emphasizes the importance of more intentionally preparing

students for work: “Students who are able to gain experience and exposure to the world of work

while in high school are better prepared to persist in and complete a postsecondary education and

succeed in pursuing livable wage careers.”10

The report proposes a new definition of career

readiness encompassing knowledge, skills, and experiences that draw on academic knowledge,

workplace readiness, and personal and social development.

In response to the 2012 report, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the

Board of Higher Education adopted an expanded definition of college and career readiness,

according to which “Massachusetts students who are college and career ready will demonstrate

the knowledge, skills and abilities that are necessary to successfully complete entry-level, credit-

bearing college courses, participate in certificate or workplace training programs, and enter

economically viable career pathways.”11

The definition goes beyond career-ready levels of

competency in English language and mathematics to include a foundation in the disciplines in

the MassCore course of study and competencies for workplace readiness as identified in the 2012

report. Workplace readiness involves demonstrating a work ethic and professionalism and

effective communication and interpersonal skills.

As states such as Massachusetts move to the next generation of education reform, they

would do well to align those efforts to the standards and aspirations that these various reports

have defined as appropriate to the twenty-first-century, rather than to the old assessment systems

that measure the narrow set of competencies deemed sufficient preparation for the jobs of the

past.

Using the PISA studies to assess the performance of our schools provides a rather narrow

window through which to explore the learning outcomes as well as the variables that may be

impacting those results. These variables, such as socioeconomic status, immigration status, and

level of education of the parents, help us understand the extent to which schools provide equal

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education opportunity. The studies focus also on characteristics of systems that are useful, and

practically measurable, for international comparisons of governance and financing. But when it

comes to predictors that characterize teacher practice or preparation, the studies are more limited.

The information on the level of preparation of the teachers is too general (whether teachers have

a BA, for example) to be of much use. Characteristics of teacher preparation, such as the

teaching program they attended, the practicum in their preparation, the professional development

they received in mathematics, and whether they are teaching the subject matter for which they

prepared, and the conditions in which they teach are important in any effort to understand how

best to support teachers. For example, is the traditional form of professional development, which

depends largely on professional learning communities where teachers help each other improve

their practice, sufficient to help teachers develop new practices to help students access the new

content at higher cognitive levels that characterizes the Common Core? According to the

Massachusetts college and career readiness definition, students who are college and career ready

in mathematics will be “academically prepared” to “solve problems involving the major content

with connections to the mathematical practices”; “solve problems involving the additional and

supporting content”; express mathematic reasoning by constructing mathematical arguments”;

and “solve real world problems, engaging particularly in the modeling practice.” The PISA

study, however, does not answer the operative questions for teacher preparation by describing,

for example, specific programs that could help teachers engage in practices, such as teaching

modeling, that for most of them will be new. The answers to these urgent questions could help

Massachusetts achieve its education objectives.

If we want to improve education outcomes, we would do well to think of improvement as

increasing the relevancy of the education our schools offer, rather than continue to look for

efficiency gains in teaching the skills of the past. To achieve these adaptive reforms we should

engaging a central actor of the education process: the teachers, both in supporting their

development and in creating effective networks of collective intelligence. Teacher professional

development has largely been an afterthought in many education reforms, including the U.S.

education reform movement, and teachers have been treated as spectators rather than the experts,

the professionals, that they are. It is time to reframe education reform in ways that invite teachers

to play a central role in designing it, implementing it, measuring it, assessing it, and engaging the

broader community in shaping the aspirations for and the conditions to support reform. After all,

that is what professionals do; they define the profession through their practice. The practice of

education is in the hands of the teachers and to have a practice that is aligned with the ambitious

requirements to prepare their students for the twenty-first century, they need to be professionally

prepared and supported. And in giving teachers voice, it is time to start using the technologies

and ideas of the twenty-first century to engage large groups of individuals in social networks that

can effectively use the talent of all their members to solve education challenges that, as the

challenges of democratic governance, are as complex as they are urgent.

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Notes

1 OECD, PISA 2012 Results, vol. 1, What Students Know and Can Do: Student Performance in Mathematics,

Reading, and Science; vol. 2, Excellence through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed; vol. 3,

Ready to Learn: Students’ Engagement, Drive, and Self-Beliefs; vol. 4, What Makes Schools Successful?:

Resources, Policies, and Practices; Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA

2012 for the United States; Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills (Paris: OECD, 2013).

2 OECD, Skills Outlook 2013, 27.

3 OECD, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers, box. 2.1.

4 Ibid., fig. 2.6.

5 Clayton Christensen has observed that the focus on metrics that emphasize efficiency leads business firms to

improve the efficiency of existing firms rather than to look for innovations that create new jobs or new markets. He

attributes to this the sustained lack of innovation in the United States and other economies in the past decades.

Clayton M. Christensen and Derek van Bever, “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” Harvard Business Review, June 2014.

6 For more discussion on the notion of collective intelligence, as an approach enabled by technology to allow

collaboration in the solution of complex problems, see Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of

Networked Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s

Emerging World in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1997), 13; Lawrence Lessig, Code Version 2.0,

2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006); James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds. New York. Anchor Books.

2004;Aaron Weiss, “The Power of Collective Intelligence,” Collective Intelligence, September 2005, 16–23.

7 The “capture” of political and public institutions by small groups of individuals in the United States and the

consequences for representation has been well analyzed by Lawrence Lessig in The USA Is Lesterland: The Nature

of Congressional Corruption (n.p.: CreateSpace, 2014). Along the same lines, in a recent essay, Francis Fukuyama

attributes the decay of U.S. institutions to a political system that is unable to represent majority interests, favoring

instead organized groups representing polarized politics. Fukuyama, “America in Decay: The Sources of Political

Dysfunction,” Foreign Affairs, September–October 2014, 5–26.

8 OECD, Ready to Learn, fig. III.5.6. In further discussions of this report, where percentages are listed, figure

numbers appear in parentheses in the text.

9 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, School Reform in the New Millennium:

Preparing All Children for 21st Century Success (Boston: Author, 2008), 23.

10 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, From Cradle to Career: Educating Our

Students for Lifelong Success (Boston: Author, 2012), 5.

11 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and Massachusetts Department of Higher

Education, Massachusetts Definition of College and Career Readiness (Boston: Author, 2013),

http://www.mass.edu/library/documents/2013college&careerreadinessdefinition.pdf.